The present invention relates generally to the field of storage device management and more particularly to primary disk selection for a data transfer.
When applications require large amounts of storage, many hard drives or other data storage device re combined together, for example, disk arrays or redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) arrays. The use of multiple storage devices combined together can yield increased storage capacity, greater performance, or greater reliability. In applications where data must be read quickly, information can be split between multiple storage devices which read and write portions of the data simultaneously for increased performance. In applications where security is important, data can be stored redundantly on multiple storage devices for protection in the event that one or more copies of the information are destroyed, corrupted, or lost.
Most common enterprise storage systems automatically make two or more copies of data for reliability purposes. Traditionally, one copy of the data serves as the primary copy while other copies serves as secondary copies of the data. Primary copies are traditionally accessed for read operations while secondary copies serve as a backup of the primary copies and are traditionally accessed only in the case of a primary copy failing.